A few months ago, NASA held their International Space Apps Challenge, a global hackathon held across over 300 locations in 184+ countries aiming to create innovative solutions for challenges we face on Earth and in space. Kintone was proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the NASA hackathon held in Boston, where young hackers in middle and high school gathered up to create fabulous solutions. Kintone provided free usage of the software, interesting use-cases and trusty mentors for the hackers of the event.
The Kintone prize
The Kintone prize was awarded to the team with the best usage of Kintone in their hack.
The Four in Dry Earth team won the Kintone prize, with their usage of Kintone in an IoT device that gathers and analyzes droughts.
The team used Raspberry Pi devices that used Python code to gather data such as irradiance, temperature, earth skin temperature, precipitation and humidity from NASA Power. The gathered data was imported into a Kintone database and was also displayed on E-paper displays and OLED displays. The displays showed the users the severity of droughts, and the Kintone databases were used to create graphs to analyze the correlation between various data sources.
The team presented a great way to use Kintone, where gathered data could be visualized in an easier format for the data analysts to be able to create hypotheses for future projects.
The Art & Technology Award
Out of the 10 competing Boston teams, the Earth, Wind & Flare team was nominated as the Global Finalist and was presented as one of the Global Winners, receiving the Art & Technology Award.
The team created an IoT device, “Where you can Uncover the Invisible,” that publicizes space weather and its impacts on the Earth in an interactive and artistic way. The solution used Raspberry Pis to gather and integrate data from multiple sources and displayed them in an interestingly engaging format on a 64x64-pixel LED matrix board.
The device was also used to show moving images of sunflare, as well as playing musical notes that gave different vibes depending on the recorded Kp index, which measures disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field caused by solar wind.
All-in-all, the young hackers of the Boston based hackathon created great examples of what could be built with the data available to us, and how it could be used to create a positive impact to the world that we live in.
Want to learn more?
Visit NASA’s Space Apps Challenge website to learn more about their events. If you're ready to try your hand at app building using Kintone’s drag-and-drop builder, sign up for a free 30-day trial today, no strings attached.
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